It definitely feels like every month this year there has been something going on that has put a little spanner in our financial works. This time I was ill...... again...... for about a week. It was horrible and obviously stressful as, as someone who is self-employed, I can't earn any money when ill. Not ideal, but it's also something we don't have any control over at the moment. Hopefully the tests I'm getting done by the doctors will come up with something that we can then fix and then I can get on with my original life where I'm not ill on a monthly basis.
Due to the whole being ill thing I've had to move some more money over from the savings to help cover some of the bills that came out at the end of September before my husband's wage went in. Not ideal, but that is what they are there for and I was able to put some money back once his pay arrived. Thankfully we've both been able to hold onto our personal emgency funds and so we still have some added security for all the financial changes that are happening at the moment.
Despite all this I was still able to pay off my credit card and almost paid every week of my pension, bar one. I'm still going to classify this as a win though as I didn't actually earn anything one week to pay it. Once things have settled I will try and make up for that but I'm not going to worry about it too much, just concentrate on paying into my pension for the rest of the year.
We did decided to move our groceries spending to a cash system to help curve the amount we were actually spending on this and I have to say that it worked a treat. We did spend a little more on the week I was ill as we were basically buying things that I could keep down, but we made up for this on the other weeks and have actually been under budget for September. We've also been a lot more conscientious about our take-away / eating out budget and have come under budget on this as well. This is all very good progress and has actually been quite painless to do.
We've also been a lot more careful about the money we spend in general on things we don't necessarily need and that has also brought our overall spending down in September. And really it couldn't have come at a better time as things are progressively getting worse in Britain when it comes to our economy. There's even talk about the possibility of us going into yet another recession, so this change in our financial habits couldn't come at a better time.
September might not have been the month I was hoping for, but we've still managed to make changes to our spending habits that has saved us money and will follow into the next months, bringing us just a little bit closer to reaching our financial goals even in the financial climate we're in at the moment.
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